Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
by jude- on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @06:08PM
(#27201923)
What on-chain attack surface? The only way to permanently knock a PoW chain offline is to consistently out-mine everyone else. In PoS, once you lose BFT quorum (1/3 of all votes), it's game over.
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Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
by vbuterin on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @07:24PM
(#27202624)
> In PoS, once you lose BFT quorum (1/3 of all votes), it's game over.
This is not how the Ethereum PoS chain's LMD GHOST fork choice works. If >1/3 drop offline, you stop finalizing, but the chain keeps growing.
Re:Ethereum will use around 99.95% less energy post merge
by jude- on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @08:09PM
(#27202994)
No distributed system is guaranteed to make forward progress if over 1/3 of its voting nodes is faulty, full stop. Once an adaptive adversary controls more than 1/3 of the voting power, they can forever delay the remaining 2/3 of the voting nodes from reaching consensus. Hell, they'd even be able to delay votes from other nodes to slash their stolen stash.
From this, I can conclude at least one of the following:
* LMD GHOST is incorrect
* your understanding of it is incorrect
* LMD GHOST is not a BFT consensus algorithm